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A goal of interactive machine learning (IML) is to create robots or intelligent agents that can be easily taught how to perform tasks by individuals with no specialized training. To achieve that goal, researchers and designers must understand how certain design decisions impact the human’s experience of teaching the agent, such as influencing the agent’s perceived intelligence. We posit that the type of feedback a robot can learn from effects the perceived intelligence of the robot, similar to its physical appearance. This talk will discuss different methods of natural language instruction including critique and action advice. We conducted multiple human-in-the-loop experiments, in which people trained agents with different teaching methods but, unknown to each participant, the same underlying machine learning algorithm. The results show that the mechanism of teaching has an impact on a human teacher’s perception of the agent, including feelings of frustration, perceptions of intelligence, and performance, while only minimally impacting the agent’s performance.